The stat that should scare every AI lab in San Francisco
a16z's Martin Casado dropped this on The Economist and nobody in the replies disputed it:
There's an 80% chance that any given startup is using Chinese models.
Not "experimenting with." Using. In production. While OpenAI and Anthropic were busy raising the next round at a number with too many zeroes, Moonshot, Alibaba, and Z.ai gave engineers something more valuable than a better eval score: permission.
This week HN put two related posts on the front page within hours of each other — China's open-weights strategy is winning racked up 1,100+ points and 800+ comments, and Ben Thompson's Who's afraid of Chinese models? followed close behind. That's not noise. That's an industry admitting it misjudged the game.
